Applications of the OP

Abstract

In recent years, we observe from literature that the VRP and OP, including their variants, have been used to model many different planning and scheduling problems from practice, such as the routing of technicians, athlete recruitment, or military applications. Recently, other practical applications, such as the tourist trip design problem, the mobile crowdsourcing problem, the smuggler search problem, the wildfire routing problem, and the integration of vehicle routing, inventory management, and customer selection problems, have been studied and use the OP as a basic model. In this chapter, various practical applications will be discussed in more detail. We will describe how different aspects from practice can actually be modeled as OP variants. More details about the formulations of the most used OP variants and algorithms to tackle these variants, will be explained in Chap. 8.